Yesterday, on a cold January morning the Race Against Blood Cancer team held their first donor drive of 2018 at the Telford 10K in Telford Town Park, signing up 34 potential life-saving donors.

Donor Drive volunteer team in January at Telford Town Park

The team would like to show their appreciation to Telford Athletic Club for allowing us to host a donor drive at the event. We’d also like to say a massive thank you to our community engagement officer Gemma Elsmore and her fab team of volunteers Natalie White, Rebecca Richards, Kayleigh-Jamie Millis, Sarah Elsmore and Danielle Hoyle.

And finally, a big thumbs up to Joe Bates, Tom Sheppard and Andrew Pugh for running and representing the charity!

Remember if you’re organising an event this year and would like us to be involved by hosting a donor drive then please get in touch!

On 29th July 2017, Race Against Blood Cancer helped organise the event “Remembering Khaleel”, in loving memory of Khaleel Khan, a 12-year-old boy, who sadly lost his battle to Leukaemia earlier in the year.

The event took place at The Duke in Telford and ran from 1 PM – 11.30 PM. The event included a number of stalls such as a tombola, a bouncy castle, hook-a-duck and live music acts every hour up until 8PM. As a boy full of love and life, the day’s events were then followed by a karaoke disco in the bar until 11.30 PM.

After such difficult times, seeing Khaleel’s family and friends enjoying the day and help educate others about blood cancer was vert heart-warming. Over 60 people attended the event and helped us raise £738 that will help Race Against Blood Cancer continue its efforts in giving every single blood cancer patient an equal chance.

We would like to give a special thanks to The Duke’s team for allowing us to use their venue for our event, Craig France for supplying the PA system and entertainment and Simon Holding for S.P. Holdings for the lorry trailer.

We would also like to thank all the music acts who dedicated their time to make this event a success and the local business for their raffle donations.

May was a busy month for the Community Engagement team in London with various donor drives including one at Flagz Carnival in Croydon and at Soul’d Out in Central London.

The busy month was topped off with a drive at Google’s Tottenham Court Road offices on 30th May. Despite being during half term, Alex and his team managed to register 100 new potential donors.

With only 20 registrations by 1PM, the team took fate in their hands and went desk to desk. They were overwhelmed with the willingness and interest of Googlers to help the cause and have already arranged a second donor drive in the same location at the end of August!

Race Against Blood Cancer would like to give a special thanks to Sam Smith for organising the drive, Googlers for their interest in the cause and to Alex Kiffin who volunteered at all Race Against Blood Cancer drives in May.

On Sunday 2nd April 2017 Race Against Blood Cancer will have several runners taking part in the Lilleshall Monumental 10K run to raise valuable funds to further our cause.

Even more importantly we plan to run a donor drive on the day in aid of the #Match4Khaleel campaign, which is an ongoing pursuit to find a lifesaving stem cell donor match for 12-year-old Khaleel from Telford.

For anyone interested in taking part in the event, it’s worth noting that the course is arguably Shropshire’s most scenic multi-terrain 10K, which is set in a rural village just outside Newport and is now in its 8th year. The course is mainly off road and with the kind permission of private landowners, it takes in woodland and tracks, passing several historic landmarks.

If you’re interested in joining our team of runners or would like to come down on the day to help us sign up donors to the stem cell register please email ben.westwood@racagainstbloodcancer.com

Race Against Blood Cancer is looking to add two part time employees to its Community Engagement Team to register lifesaving stem cell and bone marrow donors.

Successful applicants will be responsible for organising and leading their own donor drives at various locations where there are large crowds of people such as colleges, universities, sports clubs, places of work, music events etc., along with educating and signing up members of the public who are in attendance.

In the role the person will self-select where and when they want to do a donor drive, meaning there’s a lot of flexibility. The person will earn a day rate which will be dependent on how many donors they register on that day. Someone who has access to a car would be ideal given there will be travel involved.

Some of the qualities we’re looking for include but aren’t limited to the following:

A passion for community or charity related projects

Comfortable engaging with members of the public

Good organisational skills

Proactive and considered a self-starter

Good oral and written communication skills

The first phase of the application process ends on Friday 24th March by which time you will need to have submitted your CV and reasons why you’d be suitable for the role. Shortlisted candidates will then be invited to participate in a telephone and in-person interview.

The below video explains how someone becomes a potential donor. It’s worth noting that Race Against Blood Cancer and our Community Engagement team is only responsible for the registration process which involves filling out a short form and a cheek swab.

Race Against Blood Cancer is spear heading the rare mixed race bone marrow patient appeal for Khaleel Khan, a young schoolboy who is suffering from leukaemia.

Khaleel, a 12-year-old boy from Telford, West Midlands, is currently undergoing treatment at Birmingham Children’s Hospital and desperately needs a transplant next month. His mixed English and Pakistani heritage is sadly leaving him with a very slim chance of finding a donor match.

This isn’t the first time that Khaleel has to deal with adversity though, as he overcame a number of illnesses as a baby including having a shunt fitted on his brain to relieve water and meningitis, all of which he recovered from. His mum Kelly, 31, is now urging everyone who has not yet signed up to the register to do so. As she told the press “Khaleel is now on week six of the relapse treatment and will need a bone marrow transplant in February.”

Initial signs appeared in June 2014 as he started losing his appetite and his glands began swelling on his neck. Thinking it was a throat infection as other kids had had it too, doctors at Shropdoc prescribed him with antibiotics. A few days in, he still wasn’t feeling better.

“On July 6 he was complaining of leg pain, but thankfully he was still under the care of Birmingham Children’s Hospital as he had yearly checks on his shunt. We phoned them and asked if we could bring him to them and they agreed so we took him to their A&E department.”

“He was seen almost immediately and they did the usual checks including a blood test. They knew what they were looking at but needed to confirm it.”

Two hours later, the blood test results were back and confirmed what the doctors feared – leukaemia. Khaleel immediately started chemotherapy and missed the whole of year five at primary school due to illness. The treatment went well though and he returned to being a young lively boy again a year later as he returned to school. He started secondary school in September 2016 and his family was looking forward to him finishing treatment in November 2017.

Sadly, Khaleel was readmitted to Telford’s Princess Royal Hospital in November last year with a slight temperature, and after a few tests, it appeared that the leukaemia had come back. “This is going to be a long journey for Khaleel, maybe six months or more. We just don’t know”

Dr. Sarah Lawson, Birmingham Children’s Hospital’s clinical lead for stem cell transplant said: “Stem cell and bone marrow transplants form a crucial part of treatment for a number of blood cancers.

“We know that the chances of finding matching donors for our children and young people from minority ethnic or mixed race backgrounds are under 20 per cent because of a much smaller pool of potential matches.” She continues, “it’s really important that there’s a diverse range of people who are registered to donate some of their blood stem cells and bone marrow.” She added: “Testing is easy and involves a simple mouth swab or people can sign up when they are giving a blood donation, but it could potentially save a life.”

The Race Against Blood Cancer team plans to run several donor drives in the coming weeks to help find a potential lifesaving donor match for Khaleel. If you have not yet signed up to the stem cell and bone marrow register and would like to do so online, you can sign up here.

Media Madness sees our Community Engagement team set a new record at Teads London office.

Teads, a global leader in the video advertising space warmly welcomed our team on Tuesday 6th December. This marked the second drive of Media Madness with the previous record of 97 bone marrow and stem cell donor registrations currently held by Bauer Media.

On the day itself the team registered a willing 60 new donors which was an incredible achievement considering there are only 70 employees in their London office and 65 were in on this particular day.

Despite Bauer Media still topping the Media Madness leaderboard in terms of numbers, Teads set a new record for the per person ratio of those people onsite who came forward to sign up at an impressive 92%. The team at Race Against Blood Cancer couldn’t be any happier with the way the day went, with Teads truly raising the bar in terms of active participation.

A massive thank you to Elle Panes and Jonathan Nash who organised the donor drive for us on the day and did a great job rallying the troops.

November 8th marked our 20th donor drive of a busy 2016 where we were warmly welcomed by an enthusiastic team at Bauer Media UK.

As one of Europe’s largest privately-owned media groups, Bauer Media is an entertainment network of iconic, multi-platform brands.

This particular donor drive was a long time coming and is somewhat fitting that in the end the drive kicked off Media Donor Drive Madness! The highly competitive 4th quarter is where we have several media companies lined up to do end of year donor drives, with each company we visit trying to top the leader board with the most donors signed up on the day.

A massive thank you goes to Ryan Hawking-Skeggs. Not only was Ryan instrumental in organising the donor drive he took Alex our lead on the day from desk to desk to sign people up to the register.

The team would also like to extend its appreciation to everyone who supported on the day and to an extremely willing audience. As a result of such goodwill Media Donor Drive Madness had a hugely impressive start with 97 new donors registering on the day.

The amazing team at Latimer invited Race Against Blood Cancer to their event “Latimer Live” on 27th October held at the ever popular Oval Space in Bethnal Green, London.

Latimer live is an event bringing together the UK’s top emerging talent for a night of live performances and DJ sets. Previous acts have included grime stars Stormzy and Lethal Bizzle.

For those new UK music lovers who have never attended these events before, they come highly recommended. This year’s event had performances from Abracadabra, winner of Best Song at this year’s MOBO awards for Robbery remix with Krept & Konan, Mez, Kojey Radical, Knucks, Snoochie Shy, Chennessey and many more.

The night itself was filled with high energy, good vibes and a lot of dancing. The team signed a total of 32 new donors up which was also great considering the lead time we had in arranging the event. Throughout the night, we also met a number of people who have been affected by blood cancer and were interested to know more on how they could help beyond joining the registry.

This was a great night, full of talent and energy for Race Against Blood Cancer to be present at. We would like to say a massive thank you to Louise, Jack and Alfred at Latimer and to all the people who signed up on the night to help save a life.

Colourful. Fun. Informative. Educational. And Positive – these are the adjectives that describe the Carribbean Culture Festival that Race Against Blood Cancer attended on 3rd July.

Thanks to a few connections and good words on the work that we have done so far, we were kindly invited to join the celebrations at Millennium Hotel on Gloucester Road and run a donor drive as part of the Match4Tommy campaign.

The drive was a roaring success and allowed us to go home fuelled with smiles, love and energy as we managed to sign up 70 new donors to the register, what more with no prior advertising. But thanks to the captive audience, brilliant event organisers and the microphone that we were given to go on stage and talk about our work, our vision and why signing up was so important, we were able to win everyone’s hearts.

As a family friendly environment, a number of people came up to us and mentioned how they felt the Match4Tommy appeal was so important and that it was one of the contributing factors as to why they signed up.

As part of the event, Race Against Blood Cancer was surrounded by great performances, brilliant food and amazing people.

We can’t wait to take part in the event again next year and would like to say a massive thank you to Natasha, Eon and everyone else who helped make the day possible and supported us throughout.